Abd Rahman

“Although we typically take our cultural worldview for granted, it is actually a fragile human construction that people spend great energy creating, maintaining, and defending. Since we’re constantly on the brink of realizing that our existence is precarious, we cling to our culture’s governmental, educational, and religious institutions and rituals to buttress our view of human life as uniquely significant and eternal.”
― Sheldon Solomon, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life

“Life is all one long hard thing.
He must have the courage to feel alone, to look his own pain in the face, bearing the entire weight of it.”
― Carlo Michelstaedter, Persuasion and Rhetoric

“A man is never happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something that he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbour with mast and rigging gone. And then, it is all one whether he is happy or miserable; for his life was never anything more than a present moment always vanishing; and now it is over.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism: The Essays

“I am true only as I see and understand myself deep within; I am what I am for myself and in myself, and nothing else.”
― Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities